Weekend Learning

Weekend Learning

Today being Saturday and relatively free today, I just casually woke up only at about half past nine. After the initial kalai kadangal , I just thought of paying off the telephone bill which had come last week. But just had a doubt whether these jokers would be working today. I really wonder, why still, Government of India, is following this Second Saturday and Fourth Saturday practices. With private counterparts working round the clock and also offering door-pickup services, I think, BSNL should wake up from thier age old practices and correct themselves.

Well! After a bit of travel to K K Nagar Telephone Exchange, I entered at about half past one, right at the time when the exchange was closed and made the payments. When returning back to my workplace, which is at the vicinity, I came across an advertisement and a van of Sankara Netralaya and just thought that I would share this message with all readers.

Well! Being a weekend, just do a small exercise. Enter your room and close all the windows. Blind fold yourself and come out. Try doing your casual work in this same fashion at least for a minimum of half an hour. I think we would really go mad and if your house has fragile substances like glass tea pots etc, you might leave them broken too. If this simple exercise of half an hour is going to create an havoc for us, just think of our hundreds of poor fraternity who are managing their lifestyle only in this dark destiny. A statistics says that India has about 12.5 million visually impaired people, which works out to about 20% staggering figure amongst the global nations. About 3 million of these are suffering from thier visual handicaps purely because of defective cornea.

A Peek Into the Medical Terms

Cornea is a thin transparent protective layer covering the front of the eye. In some cases, due to congenital defects and/or otherwise, this transparency converts itself into opacity blocking light rays and thus bringing in visual impaired behavior.  Eye sight can be restored by a simple surgical process called Corneal Grafting. Defects from other ailments may not be possible from this and the entire cornea needs to be replaced. In India, though the average death rate is about 8 million per year, only about 15000 corneas are actually harvested to eye banks.  It is a good and noble practice in Sri Lanka of eye donation and hence we import corneas from there.

So what we need is that a strong vigor and a initiative in India that after death of people, the corneas need to be donated to eye banks instead of either burying it along with the corpse or burning it. A wasted cornea in that way, can help another fraternity to see and experience the world.

Is the eye donation painful? Not at all. The eyes are not going to be disturbed as long as there is a breathing. Only from the dead corpse, the eye bank team is going to extract the cornea, with the consent of relatives. The deceased, hence, has to have his name registered with the eye bank and keep his relatives, kith and kin informed regarding the same.

That simple, I have a compiled a brief list of points on eye donation from a various URLs.  Check out this:

1. Process of Donation of Eye
2. Sankara Netralaya Eye Bank

Hence, let us take this initiative to spread this message and help eye banks light up more candles and abolish the darkness in the world.